I haven't seen
Doomsday yet, but I want to -- I loved Neil Marshall's
Descent, and despite the
28 Days Later meets
Resident Evil meets
Road Warrior mix-and-match vibe of the trailer, I can't believe this director doesn't deliver something interesting with this new film.
Filmmaker contributor Travis Crawford, who has seen the film and sent the below in an email, corroborates my feelings that
Doomsday may offer more than people are giving it credit for.
From Crawford:
I felt that it was a very self-knowing, vintage Verhoeven-esque PARODY of the ultra-violent futuristic action thrillers from which it admittedly derives much inspiration -- I found it often hysterically funny, and a more authentically post-modern satire of the genre than people are giving it credit for being. I also find it incredibly ironic that it opened on the same day as the loathsome, patronizing FUNNY GAMES remake -- DOOMSDAY seemed to me to be a much more intelligent critique of the exploitation of violence in cinema, but it so perfectly and organically internalized the visual vocabulary of the very genre that it was satirizing that I think people missed the point of the whole exercise. Meanwhile, more blatantly "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" post-modern media critiques like HOT FUZZ (which I mildly enjoyed, but it ends there) and DIARY OF THE DEAD (which I actively disliked) get acclaim only because they're so obvious in their self-referential back-patting smugness that everyone is in on the joke.
I think that the "problem" with the satirical elements in DOOMSDAY is that this is a film that, forgive the sports metaphor, showed up on the playing field willing to play the game on the game's established rules -- it doesn't hover above the spectators to deliver ironically detached commentary in the vein of DIARY OF THE DEAD, because it attempts to engage you in the Ritalin-riddled, rapid-fire spectacle while it simultaneously points out the absurdity of it all (think STARSHIP TROOPERS). Still, I can't fathom that a nation of film critics appeared to just seriously regard a film wherein an anorexic girl in a tank top and skin-tight pants defeats a medieval knight in full armor and horseback within an ancient castle courtyard presided over by a fur coat-clad Malcolm McDowell, and then proceeds on to an ultra-futuristic car chase; pardon me while I hold the necessary funeral for irony. The satire in DOOMSDAY might have escaped a lot of critics because it's both meta-cinematic (she wears a Plissken-like eye patch because one of her eyeballs is a camera!) and politically metaphorical (despite being set entirely in the U.K., I think Marshall is remarking on post-9/11 American isolationism and fear-mongering). And I do think that the ultra-ADD editing is Marshall's way of poking fun at the Michael Bay aesthetic of action sequences today.
Comments (1)
I think the problem with the satirical elements in Doomsday is that THERE ARE NONE. And the ADD editing in the action sequences is not making fun of anything; it's just an extremely bad instance of the same.
Crawford needs to man up and accept that he just liked the movie in spite of it being incredibly derivative and having VERY badly edited fights. There's nothing wrong with having guilty pleasures, Mr. Crawford. You don't have to pretend this movie is "brilliant satire" in order to enjoy it.
It's still a relatively fun movie, largely because Rhona Mitra is awesome and there are a few hilarious moments of over-the-top gore -- but she (and we) deserve a lot better.
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posted by Gordon McAlpin @ 3/19/2008 5:17 PM
